Recent New York Video Art Survives (on the Internet)

Still from Ken Okiishi, (Goodbye to) Manhattan, 2010, on view at Alex Zachary, New York. Photo: 16 Miles [more]

There is always a sense of sadness after watching a great work of video art in a New York gallery: barring a miracle, one is unlikely to see it again any time soon. We can snap photographs of our favorite paintings or sculptures and revisit them later (however imperfectly), but time-based work disappears after a show ends. Thankfully, the redoubtable media archive UbuWeb has been uploading just that type of work at a ferocious pace, including many works that were on view just this past season. Here are three favorites from that bunch, plus one classic New York-art documentary

1. Ken Okiishi, (Goodbye to) Manhattan, 2010: This was the sleeper-hit of the the past year. After debuting at Alex Zachary, it made an encore performance this summer in Berlin, the setting of much of the film. While occasionally impenetrable, Okiishi's reworking of Woody Allen's 1979 panegyric to New York should be remembered as an elegiac document of a particular time in the contemporary art world, as it struggled through a recession and expanded into new cities.

2. Eric Baudelaire, Sugar Water, 2007: This gem appeared at Invisible-Export's "A Vernacular of Violence" just a few months ago. A man applies a poster in a French subway. Then he applies another. And another. A slow-motion, highly mediated depiction of extreme destruction begins to appear, as commuters — unaware — go about their business.

3. Brion Gysin, Demonstration of Gysin Permutation Software, 2010: This computer-generated poem is not the most thrilling section of the New Museum's current "Brion Gysin: Dream Machine" show, the first U.S. retrospective of the artist, but watching the program slice apart a short text by Gysin and write out all of the possible permutations of its contents isn't a bad way to spend a few minutes.

4. Nigel Finch, Arena–Robert Mapplethorpe, 1988: Shot the year before Mapplethorpe died, this hour-long documentary includes footage of the photographer at work and features interviews with some of his subjects (not all of the enamored of his work). "Pay attention," gallerist Robert Miller says, when asked to define Mapplethorpe's artistic message. "Time's going by."

Goldin, Kandinsky, Calle, Hickey, etc. [Collected]

Güllüoğlu, Vişneli Baklava with Sour Cherry, 2009. Photo: 16 Miles [more]

• Nan Goldin slide show.
• Vasily Kandinsky slide show. [via Winkleman]
  
• Charlie Finch dislikes Dave Hickey. [via Two Coats]
  
• Roberta Smith visits Chelsea.
  
• Koons: Yacht decorator becomes collection curator. Wagner: suicide by banality.
• The Herzog film school returns. [via C-Monster]
• A contemporary art mecca in Brazil [via Greg.org]
• "Sotheby's raised more at a single sale of rare wine in Hong Kong this summer than at all of its London wine auctions combined all year." - Wall Street Journal
• Stalker, stripper, sleeper, spy.
  

Twombly Best-Dressed, Post-Crisis Aesthetics, Expensive Whiskey [Collected]

Claes Oldenburg, Apple Core, 1990 at Kentuck Knob, Pennsylvania. Photo: 16 Miles [more]

• New York Street Art Map
• Creative Time Comics!
• Charlie Finch: "Male chauvanism never went away." [via Edward Winkleman]
• Museums: Where the Boys Aren't working
• Sad Roerich theft; at least we now know the Nicholas Roerich Museum exists
• Bruce High Quality at Harris Lieberman reviewed; performance text
• More on the end of incandescent light in Europe
• Post-Crisis Aesthetics: Flood, Baer, Kern, Peers
• Cy Twombly on the Vanity Fair best-dressed list with Chiara Clemente, Agnes Gund, Alicia Keys
• Contemporary Art and Sweet Foodstuffs: I wish I had thought of this
• Luc Sante on Warhol's Thirteen Most Wanted Men [via Brian Sholis]
• Vintage Whiskey prices up
• Rachel Hayes, killing it downtown

Everything Good in 2008

With 2008 now over, it's time to look over the Top 10 and year end lists that came out throughout December.  (I posted my list last week.)  In New York, William Eggleston: Democratic Camera at the Whitney, Abstract/Abstraction at the Jewish Museum, and Catherine Opie: American Photographer at the Guggenheim seemed to be the big winners.

Some year end pieces:

• Jerry Saltz - # 1 - Tino Sehgal at Marian Goodman, "I was horrified, mortified, and thrilled."
• Hrag Vartanian - #1: Abstract/Abstraction at the Jewish Museum, "a fascinating take on a topic that has been done to death."
• Joanne Mattera - Mary Heilmann at the New Museum, "The perfect yin and yang of loose-limbed geometry and aggressive color."
• Anaba (Bromirski) - RH Quaytman, Michael Zahn, Megan Pflug, and a bunch of other art no one else was covering.
• Modern Art Notes (Green) - Sarah Oppenheimer at the Mattress Factory, "stole the show" from the nearby Carnegie International.  
• Jen Graves - #1: WACK!  Art and the Feminist Revolution, "I just want to keep looking. And looking. And looking."
• Peter Schjeldahl - Jeff Koons retrospective in Chicago and his sculptures on top of the Met, "the most perfect—and perfectly enchanting—valedictory to the era suddenly past."
• Christopher Knight - Catherine Opie: American Photographer at the Guggenheim, "a marvelous retrospective whose only real drawback is that it won't travel west from its originating venue."

Two quirkier, wonderful lists:

• Kenneth Baker - Art Picks: Top Art Tome: Salon to Biennial - Exhibitions That Made Art History, 1863-1959.
• Colin Gleadell - Top Art Market Moments: #1: "Against a backdrop of extreme financial volatility, the year opens with Sotheby's, Christie's, Bonhams and Phillips de Pury & Co all announcing record sales for 2007 $13.4 billion between them, up by an average 50 per cent on 2006. How long can this last?"

Finally, Charles Finch has some predictions for the art world in 2009: "Damien Hirst's career is over. Like those of Schnabel, Cucchi, Salle and other victims of the late 1980s crash, Hirst’s values will never recover."